The fall has a crispness many find intoxicating. Evening air cools. Kids return to school. Football kicks off.

For marketers, September initiates planning season. Yes…it is time to start thinking, assessing, evaluating and budgeting for 2018.

Here are the four things I have heard from your counterparts as it relates to priorities:

Get Personal: Broad-based communications activities fail to address the unique requirements of a sales prospect. Through marketing automation and CRM platforms, messaging and offers can be customized and tailored.

Think Lifetime Value:Research consistently reveals it is easier (and more profitable) to grow an existing relationship than attempt to win a new customer. Account based marketing is hot, yet it is often directed towards new logos. A number of forward-thinking companies plan to invest more in increasing share of wallet with current accounts.

It Is In the Data: Marketers plan to watch everything — traffic on the corporate site, Email opens, content downloads, social shares and event attendance. By collecting and studying data, an organization can focus its resources on prospects with a higher propensity to buy.

Love the Brand: A number of marketers plan to set aside budget for advertising, public relations and traditional brand building activities. People do business with companies they know and trust. It is still true today!

We all know today’s business buyer is more elusive than ever. That’s why these approaches are so important. When the time comes to pitch a prospect, a company has to be disciplined and structured. For revenue capture to be scalable, it must be process driven.

Yet, methodologies aside, many struggle when it comes to addressing a foundational requirement of sales. Your reps need to get in front of buyers, preferably at a time when they are open to learning about your solutions.

This is why a fair share of the marketing budget is still allocated to industry events and conferences – even though their efficacy continues to wane. It’s why “social selling” is a core component of training for enterprise and inside reps. And it is why an increasing number of companies like yours have signed on to sponsor and participate in online buyer communities that cater to customers in high value vertical markets.

This week Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) introduces new buyer communities comprised of senior executives and technologists who work in financial services, insurance and retail. They are a wonderful complement to our existing sites in government, healthcare and business-to-business marketing.

Check ‘em out. Subscribe. Tell your customers, partners and co-workers. And let us know if you are interested in contributing content. We are always on the search for insightful and timely thought leadership.

For years the missives wandered into my Email inbox from exotic locales such as Pune, Bangalore and Bucharest. Regardless of the origin, the offer was the same: cheap content creation to gin up search optimization.

Google’s adoption of a more sophisticated search algorithm that penalizes low value and limited social sharing strangled many of these content farms. However, as any business-to-business marketer will attest, the pitches solider on. The source, theme and value proposition have merely shifted.

“I came across your profile on LinkedIn and found it very interesting,” she wrote to me last week. “We’re primarily focused on creating high quality blog content…think well researched, time consuming blog posts…not generic 500 word SEO fluff.”

That is compelling, right? Companies that produce and publish a steady stream of thought leadership oriented content attract more qualified leads and close a higher percentage of business.

It is because few marketers have taken the critical step of connecting engagement to demand. For many, content creation is a “check the box” tactic that – like other brand oriented activities – relies on hope to produce a measurable outcome.

Marketers tend to live in a world of hope with their content. I hope a prospect finds it. I hope it inspires them to contact my company. I hope my sales team moves on the opportunity. I hope it turns into revenue.

Here are three ways you can elevate your content program from a hopeful tactic to a strategic function that generates sales pipeline:

Align content creation with account based marketing.Here is an example from Dupont Fabros Technology’s From the Racks corporate blog.

Let’s set the scene. It is late Sunday evening and I’m hurtling along I83 towards Baltimore returning from a youth basketball tournament in wonderful Spooky Nook, Pennsylvania. My sons are camped out in the back seat lost in the allure of their phones, giving me free reign over the radio.

Stephen Stills sings, “Well there’s a rose in the fisted glove…and the eagle flies with the dove…and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey…love the one you’re with…love the one you’re with.”

Two things strike me as the chorus bounces around my mind: 1) Stephen Still had really cool side burns; and 2) we as business-to-business marketers spend too much time and allocate too many resources to pursue new leads. What about our existing customers — the ones we are with?

Are customers aware of your company’s full portfolio of services and capabilities? Have their needs changed since the relationship between your companies was initiated? Are there new decision-makers or influencers?

I’m uncomfortable when I attempt to answer those questions about my own business. So…here are three things I plan to do about it:

Social media map, connect with and follow every client. In addition to ongoing dialogue, I want to understand what they’re sharing online. It is going to tell me a lot about the direction of their business and its priorities.

Make customer education core to Strategic Communications Group’s (Strategic) content strategy. I still want to appeal to prospects, yet our editorial calendar will now be better aligned with the requirements and needs of our client portfolio.

Profile clients and their innovative approaches on Modern Marketing Today. This is Strategic’s online magazine for business-to-business and public sector marketers and sales professionals. I can contribute to a client’s professional reputation and standing, while demonstrating the value I place on the relationship.